Kent Displays, the company that makes the Boogie Board tablet, is getting more VC money and is hiring 40 more employees in Ohio.

The Boogie Board is a modern equivalent to the old-fashioned chalk slate – a device that allows users to write and quickly erase messages on a screen the size of a sheet of paper. Company spokesman Kevin Oswald said orders for the boards have forced the plant to run three shifts a day for much of the year.

He added that he expects orders to increase this fall when the company adds a version of the board that can save images for later use.

“[The expansion] will allow us to meet worldwide demand for the Boogie Board tablets for the foreseeable future,” Oswald said.

Sales of multimedia tablets, such as Apple’s iPad or Motorola’s Xoom, have boomed this year, but Oswald said Kent’s product doesn’t compete with those. Boogie Boards cost $40-$60, depending on size, and are meant as a replacement for notepads and paper, not computers.

It will be interesting to see if this technology eventually finds it’s way into the all-purpose tablets.

Here are some tips for creating your online dating profile. The article is aimed more towards advice for women, but men can benefit from some of the tips as well. Online dating is becoming more and more popular, so everyone should check it out if you’re looking for love or even a hookup.

Read the whole article, but here’s one of the tips:

7. Don’t Provide A Laundry List Of Things You Don’t Want

“No ultimatums,” says Davis.

Starting out with “Don’ts” and “Nevers” makes you sound negative and also tends to induce oversharing. If you say you could never be with a guy who isn’t as loyal as Lassie, odds are someone will read between the lines and figure out your last boyfriend cheated on you.

This is pretty good advice, as many profiles created by women seem to have plenty of ultimatums.

Another tip we think women should consider involves picture of their dogs. So many women seem to be obsessed with their pets, and then litter their profile with photos of the dog. Really? Unless the guy is a real dog lover, this is going to turn him off. Let him meet your pet and then see how it goes, but pictures of dogs, particularly those tiny designer dogs, are going to chase many men away.

The famous Grateful Dead lyric is, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” While those words were describing the drug-fueled events of the 1960s, they could easily be attributed to the evolution of the cell phone. For one, the size of cell phones has changed dramatically with each generation.

They were first manufactured in a size similar to a brick (think Zack Morris in Saved by the Bell) and then shrunk to the scale of a cracker. And then there is a cell phone’s capability—at their inception they could only make static-filled phone calls, while today we use them for anything but calls.

However, the advancements of cell phones themselves are only half the story. Their popularity helped revolutionize data and communication networks; like the latest satellite technology from wildbluedeals and wireless communications. So from 1G to 4G, here is a recount of the trip travelled thus far, and where the journey may be taking us next.

1G

In the 1980s, man made the first cell phone network for mass consumers, and it was fairly decent. The first generation of wireless telephony was completely analog based, unlike its progeny that runs on digital systems.

In the U.S., cell phones operated on the AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone System) network (TACS and NMT in Europe), which basically modulated calls to a higher frequency around 150MHz or more. Hardly what one would call advanced; it was as if your cell phone was just as powerful as your ham radio.

Meanwhile, the phones themselves were bulky and had nearly no data capability whatsoever. That meant no texting, no cameras and no apps. Teenyboppers in the 80s sure had it rough.

2G

The digital age finally arrived in the second generation. In the early 1990s, digital TDMA-based systems were introduced—GSM first in Europe and D-AMPS in the U.S. With digital technology, voice quality improved, security was stronger and power was increased, while equipment became less expensive and more refined (i.e. phones that could really be considered hand-held). Read the rest of this entry »

Shortly after the announcement – a 15 second video clip in which a cheery Shaquille said “I’m about to retire. Love you.” – the tech blogosphere lit up, thrilled that such a mainstream event had been announced over the web. Some said it “proves the power of Twitter.” But how? Perhaps the only thing bigger than Shaquille O’Neal’s physical form is his online presence. He has nearly 4 million followers on Twitter and 2 million Facebook fans. His real world celebrity status still exists on the internet – what is so powerful about that?

Check out the entire article. In the end, Shaq was hyping a new service called Tout which let’s you upload 15 second video clips and send them out on Twitter. It was really just a PR stunt, and in that sense it worked!

Our world is getting smaller and smaller, but not just because planes are getting faster and more people than ever live in the cities. One reason the world is getting smaller is because everything is shared, no matter where you go or what you’re doing. Even things as simple as movies and music collections can be shared easily through the use of companies like www.directstartv.com and a variety of platforms all over your home.

While some people think that media sharing is somehow brought about through fairy dust or phases of the Moon, this is just silly. In reality, it concerns a completely non-magical cloud and the settings on a variety of devices you might already have in your home. While it can be a bit of work to set up things initially, ultimately, your reward will be a lot of easy transferring.
Let’s look at how your media files get shared through various devices.

Apple’s Home Sharing

Apple is well known for making everything work with everything else for the most part. While the Apple Store occasionally has an issue with buying something on one platform and sending it to another, this is a fairly small issue that can easily be worked around. Ultimately, most Apple products perform extraordinarily well together and share efficiently.

For instance, sharing media files with Apple products such as the iPod, iPad and iPhone is a fairly simple matter. Since the later versions of these products are all equipped with wireless capabilities, all you have to do is enable file sharing in them and in your iTunes account. From there, assuming you have the right operating system installed for all of your hardware, sharing is as simple as clicking on the album or song you want to listen to.

Naturally, additional steps are required to store songs or other files on a wireless device in order to take them out of your home network’s range. However, they’re pretty simple, and the transfer process takes mere minutes if your connection is solid.

Home Streamers

There are a lot of different products that allow you to play your favorite media files without having to use your computer for such a task. While you can always hook up your computer to a TV and essentially use it as an external monitor, most people’s home theater setups are a lot different than their computer area setups.Read the rest of this entry »